Might or Modeling? DifferentApproaches to Climate Change

ast year in the midst of the Paris Climate Summit(COP21), Robert Marzec found himself facing anapproach to climate change far different than theone he’d been researching. Marzec, a professor of Englishfocusing on environmental studies and postcolonialism,has identified a trend toward applying a military mindset toenvironmental issues. But at COP21, he turned his attentionto the efforts of indigenous people working to influenceclimate policy.

“The idea of ‘inhabitancy’ is still alive in many of these
indigenous communities,” Marzec says. This idea—of
an obligation between humans and the ecosystems they
inhabit—is the key alternative to the subject of his recently
published book, Militarizing the Environment: Climate
Change and the Security State. “Environmentality, on
the other hand,” explains Marzec, is a combat-oriented,
“self-destructive pattern of thought” about environmental
issues.

“Environmentality is a term meant to describe ageneral attitude towards environments, in which theyare manipulated for defensive purposes. This meansthat alternative, transformative relationships withthe environment, based on stewardship and care, arediminished,” Marzec says. “If you read some of the morerecent publications that have been coming out of theDepartment of Defense since 2007, you’ll notice that theytake climate change quite seriously, which is great. Butyou’ll also see that a number of them encourage scientistsThese scenarios range from conflicts due to loss offood, water, and energy to the mass migration of millionsdisplaced by rising sea levels. Examining scientific,military, political, and economic formations across fivecenturies, Marzec illustrates how environmentalitythreatens to supplant ideas of sustainability with demandsfor defense-oriented versions of adaptation.

David Johnson, an assistant professor in industrialengineering with a joint appointment in political science,works on similar doomsday situations, focusing on“decision-making under deep uncertainty.” Johnson, whois also an adjunct mathematician at the RAND Corporation,performs statistical analysis on a range of climatechange scenarios to determine “which uncertainties andpossibilities are likely to make an environmental policyfail.”His skills in modeling and advocating for effectiveenvironmental policy make him a perfect fit for Purdue’sresearch cluster focused on building sustainablecommunities. The cluster, a group of faculty who arepart of Discovery Park’s Center for the Environment,focuses on the connections across various human,natural, and engineered systems. The group will studycritical infrastructure, the ability of ecological and builtenvironments to bounce back from challenges, and theways people and institutions make decisions about theseenvironments. To do this requires not only experts inengineering, natural resources, and psychology—but alsothose in the social sciences and humanities, who studyindividual, cultural, and institutional systems of thoughtand behavior.

It’s this attention to inhabiting our environment in
sustainable ways that Marzec advocates for in his own
research. Through the lens of environmentality, “defensive
efforts are seen as more important than concentrating
and devoting efforts to transforming how we relate to the
environment,” says Marzec. “The Department of Defense,
for instance, held a ‘climate change war game’ back in
2009. Game players began to address global warming